Conrad was on the show back in LFP020 since when he has built Funding Options (strapline “your free marketplace for business finance”) into one of the most successful London Fintechs. They were chosen as one of three UK government mandated SME Referral Portals, are the largest of those by an order of magnitude, increased revenue fourfold last year, are on target to triple again this year as well as being on target to be the UK’s largest introducer of working capital finance.

Funding Options essential task/service is lining up all the many SME borrowers out there with relevant sources of Finance. A task made all the harder by the plethora of lenders and the many types of lending finance available.

Investment management – despite its known deficiencies – has been least disrupted perhaps so far by “Fintech”. The first wave of I.M. Fintechs (pre- & up to 2015) promised “democratisation” but have made relatively little headway. The awfully named “roboadvisers” are neither robo nor advisers but are ludicrously hyped.

There’s also the rather challenging question of what is there to be disrupted if ETFs (see LFP058) can be bought for roughly zero commission and have minimal fees.

Against this background I was delighted to come across Adam French – he and two other ex-Goldman Sachs colleagues launched Scalable Capital in both the UK and Germany a little over a year ago, and, as befits their background, really know of what they speak. They also have the advantage of befitting from V1.0 of the great “digitalisation of wealth management” experiment and can better design V2.0. They claim to be Europe’s fastest growing “online wealth manager” with around 4,000 clients, £150m of assets under management, and have a tie-up with ultra-blue-chip Siemens to power their employee benefits platform in Germany.

Trussle are the UK’s first online mortgage broker, have just raised £4.5m in a Series A and have an exclusive partnership with the FTSE listed property search giant Zoopla. So they are doing well for a two year old startup 🙂

I am joined today by founder and CEO Ishaan Malhi to discuss why this sector is so important.

As often it’s the old-fashioned and unsexy stuff that is ripe for disruption. In the case of mortgage advice though there is another astounding nanny state regulatory change that has made it even more important to have a low cost Fintech solution.

In essence (FCA summary here) in the UK if you want to keep certain legal protections (not defined but being able to complain about mis-selling appears to be one) you must take mortgage advice :-! And this advice can be quite expensive as we shall hear.

And if you want to talk about a world orientated around the 0.1% (corrupt state?) if you are part of the 0.1% – then like taxes you don’t need to bother! Golly gosh. And if you think I exaggerate check out the FCA’s webpage in re.

So can Fintech ride to the rescue?

Well apparently it can, although what is defined as “advice” is very fluid in a world spanning old-fashioned advice and more automated Fintechs. In LFP069 we discussed advice on your asset side of the balance sheet. In this context LFP070 is about advice on the liabilities side of your balance sheet.

Trussle’s strapline is:

The hassle-free way to get a mortgage online. We search more than 11,000 deals from 90 lenders to find the perfect mortgage for you.

Not only that but you can enter your mortgage details at the moment and they will monitor all those deals on an ongoing basis and let you know

“Everyone” frets over financial advice in the Fintech Age. Regulators set out to “protect the consumer”, worthy bodies talk no end about the need to protect “people” (never themselves oddly – generally they imply (/mean) folks of lesser education/wealth) and the rest of us are just confused over the labyrinthine rules around tax, savings and investments.

Needless to say a myriad on rules and regulations and the implicit costs of this suprastructure all act together in a Kafkaesque way to produce the opposite result – known as “the advice gap”.

In Fintechland breathless media and PR firms high on sugar, caffeine and other stimulants promise us a golden era of so-called “roboadvice”.

How to make sense of all this?

I am delighted to be joined today by Dan Kiernan Research Director at Intelligent Partnership “the UK’s leading provider of research, training and events on Alternative Investments” to cut through all this and to give us insights into why advisers are not recommending eg P2P to their clients when it has outperformed bank deposits for more than a decade.